The World Wide Web Foundation, the British Law Society, the Financial Times and a host of digital rights campaigners all think rushing through the DRIP Act as “emergency” legislation is a terrible idea.

Wattpad has raised a financing round of $46 million from a group led by Canadian pension fund OMERS that the collaborative-writing platform says will help it expand its global community of writers and readers and add more support

In a manifesto for where he wants to take Bloomberg Media, new CEO Justin Smith talked about expanding the financial news giant’s reach on the web — including a rethinking of its Businessweek strategy — as well as moving aggressively into mobile and video

How does the Bitcoin ecosystem handle a hacking crisis? The Manhattan U.S. attorney wants to know. Meanwhile, everyone wants to know what went down at MtGox, which has reportedly failed to find a buyer for some strange reason.

Google may control a large chunk of the mobile advertising market, but it is still trying to understand how to improve its performance, so it has funded a startup called YieldMo that specializes in mobile ads

Financial regulators and company registration indexes are increasingly opening up their data. OpenCorporates is gluing that data together and visualizing it in a way that should not only help fight corruption, but clean up the data too.

I’ve been living a paper-free existence for a while, but this year I broke down and bought a printer. The experience showed me that for all the talk about going digital, we’re still very much in a transitional phase.

The Google-backed distributed currency exchange, which is part of a new wave of international financial technology outfits, is trying to make it easier for people to pay others in the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

Foursquare said Thursday it has raised $41 million to expand its location-based service, but the financing is convertible debt rather than equity, which increases the pressure on the company to prove it has a real business.

PayPal is enabling small and medium-sized merchants to offer Bill Me Later as a financing option for online transactions. Consumers can get no-interest financing for six months on purchases of $99 or more. The move should help small businesses by increasing order sizes and conversions.

Wealthfront, a San Francisco startup that is an SEC-registered online financial advisor, has launched an interactive tool for the tech community that lets people research cash compensation and equity packages across a range of jobs.

LearnVest, a New York-based personal finance startup, is on Tuesday rolling out a suite of significant upgrades to its platform, including its first mobile app, as well as announcing that it has become an SEC-Registered Investment Advisor (RIA).

FutureAdvisor raised $5 million from Sequoia, Keith Rabois and Jeremy Stoppelman to build out its personal finance advising service. The Seattle company makes it easy to get tips on how to reduce fees and taxes, diversify your portfolio and achieve your financial goals.

Company filings this week suggest economic worries have resurfaced the downturn in the free web’s engine oil – advertising . Some digital operators are celebrating sheltering in paid content, but others are still courting advertisers. What do their fortunes tell us about the recipe for online success?

Facebook reported earnings that met estimates on Thursday, but that wasn’t enough for some investors — who clearly wanted to see the company outperform even the rosiest expectations. Meeting those lofty goals will be a challenge for Facebook in the future, especially as its growth rate slows.

London-based financial startup The Currency Cloud, which offers businesses a platform to dramatically cut their cross-border payment costs, has just sealed a $3.1m round of investment from Notion Capital — and the cash comes with serious ambitions attached.

The New York Times is launching a Chinese-language news site, cn.nytimes.com. Aimed at “educated, affluent, global citizens,” the site will publish about 30 articles a day in categories like world affairs, business and culture.

BancBox is formally launching its payment platform today, offering not just the ability to accept credit card and other payments, but also hold the funds in stored accounts and move it around between financial institutions, all in compliance with regulatory requirements.

Payday loans business Wonga has become hot property in the U.K. over the last few years — but with the prospect of a Nasdaq IPO on the cards, the company is still struggling to overcome the public’s distrust of money lenders.

SigFig, a product born from portfolio tracker Wikinvest, is finally launching formally Tuesday. The free service allows users to sync all their investments and monitor them in real-time from one dashboard with extensive analysis conducted in the background to help find where users can save money.

Tech giants may have their own views on what journalism should become, but some news organisations are questioning what benefits the social vision of future news can really bring at a time when they’re struggling for business survival…

Led by former Intuit CEO Bill Harris, Personal Capital has set its sights on giving people control over their money and investments. Now the company is expanding its online service with an iPad application that makes it easier for users to see and touch their money.

Being the resident “extreme” iPhone case enthusiast, I was intrigued by the new cellhelmet Kickstarter project. This $44.99 case combines svelte design with protection against drops, but bundles it with an actual insurance policy that replaces your iPhone if damaged while in the case.

Many of us got some great tech gifts during the holidays. Knowing what exactly you have, and keeping critical info handy can make life easier when problems occur. Here are a few simple tips you can use now to save time and money in the future.

The Financial Times struck out on its own recently with a web-based mobile app, which replaces its native iOS apps. So far, the experiment has been a success, with the app already seing more traffic from the web app than from its iPhone and iPad applications.

Henry Lane Fox, the chief executive of The Browser, doesn’t like the term “curation.” But he’s staking his reputation on precisely that, by building a high-end, human-powered engine for linking to the best and most intelligent writing online.

One company is about to find out how web apps compete with native iOS App Store offerings in a very direct sense. The Financial Times is out of the App Store, and now depends on an HTML5 tablet-optimized site alone for presence on Apple devices.

Ever since co-founder Larry Page took over as CEO in January, Google has been getting more businesslike, shutting down projects like Google Health and now Google Labs. While this may be a sign of maturity, it could also make the company less experimental — and less interesting.

The Financial Times has struck out on its own against Apple, urging subscribers to switch away from iTunes in favor of a dedicated HTML5 app. It helps the venerable newspaper break free of Steve Jobs’s iron grip — but will others follow suit?

The Kauffman Foundation claims in a new report that high-paying jobs in the financial sector have drained the prospective pool of startup founders until it’s pretty shallow. It may even be responsible for allowing “potentially weaker” startups to gain funding. Here’s a look at the arguments.

As expected, Groupon announced today that it has completed a gigantic financing of $950-million from a group of high-profile funds, including Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. Now all it has to do is prove that it can carve out a long-term business amid escalating competition.

The details of Apple’s 10-K filing for 2011 include an increased employee headcount, higher capital expenditure targets, and a decrease in its gross margin for the second year in a row. Is this a mix that promises another year as innovative as was 2010?

E-books and tablet-based digital textbooks may be the cool new thing, but renting old-fashioned paper books still seems to be attracting plenty of interest: Chegg, the leader in the textbook-rental market, has just closed a new $75-million round of financing, according to multiple news reports.

Envivio has shuffled the management deck, replacing its CFO and COO while raising an additional $15 million in new financing. In addition to the new management team members, Envivio’s chairman of the board will take on a bigger role in the management structure as executive chairman.

As in so many other cities that aren’t located in or near Silicon Valley, the startup scene in Toronto is a fairly small and close-knit community. Now, a VC-backed school/competition called Extreme University will look for startups to “audition,” American Idol-style.

Backupify has landed a round of financing for its cloud-based backup service from First Round Capital, Betaworks and some high-profile angel investors including Jason Calacanis. But the new company will have to clear the same hurdles as any other cloud-based service — and then some.

In a previous article, I listed finance as a major component of successful web working. The problem is that while you’re juggling work and household responsibilities it can be hard to find the time to keep your accounts in order.

BlueKai, which aggregates and sells data on 200 million online shoppers to advertisers and publishers, today announced a $21 million third round of funding led by GGV Capital and including former investors Redpoint Ventures and Battery Ventures, bringing its total funding to $34.7 million.

After Monday, the belief that Silicon Valley is going to remain immune from the Wall Street fallout is gone. While some tech companies had been saying they weren’t worried that the credit crunch would hurt them, I don’t believe them.

I’ve taken seven of the more interesting stocks of 2007 — all stocks that inspired a good deal of passionate discussion and, for the most part, a good deal of capital gains — and ranked them according to how I think they’ll perform in 2008. Take a look.